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A sleek new study desk sat against another wall, with a wireless gaming headset arranged neatly beside an iPad stand. Remote-control cars, giant Lego building sets, boxes of board games, and more toys than I could possibly count were organized around the room like somebody had spent hours deciding exactly where everything belonged. Even the plain beige curtains had been replaced with heavy custom blackout drapes in navy and crimson.

Nothing about it looked thrown together, nothing looked cheap, and there was no way in hell any of it had been in this room before breakfast.

For several long seconds, I couldn’t find a single word in my vocabulary.

Willow stepped around my shoulder, took three slow steps into the room, and stopped dead.

“What the hell?” she muttered.

Kaidence was already sitting cross-legged on the plush carpet, tearing into one of the large toy boxes with pure joy. “Mommy, look!”

“Kaidence...” I murmured.

He proudly held up a detailed twelve-inch Spider-Man action figure. “How did all this get here?! None of this was here before I went downstairs to eat!”

Kaidence kept right on talking, which was probably for the best because I didn’t have a single reasonable explanation to give him.

He grabbed another box from the pile. “Did Santa come early?!”

He didn’t even wait for me to answer before ripping into it.

While Kaidence happily bounced from one gift to the next like he had just hit the five-year-old lottery, Willow and I slowly met each other’s eyes across the doorway.

I gestured around the transformed room. “Still think this is normal?”

Willow’s attention drifted from the TV to the mural, then over to the leather gaming chair and the mountain of unopened boxes.

“Lakelyn, remember when I said whatever is in this house seems to like us, and that maybe it’s Caspian… or some other ghost?”

“Yeah.”

Willow slowly backed toward the doorway until she was standing behind me again. “I would like to amend that statement.”

“To what?”

“What if whole time we thinking we got a spirit in here, or your missing man hiding in the walls somewhere, and it’s really a damn genie answering wishes?”

I turned toward her. “A genie, Willow? Really?”

She shrugged. “A selective genie, obviously. Mine still owes me crab legs, so either it got boundaries or it just doesn’t respect seafood requests. But hear me out. Kaidence wanted a Spider-Man room, and now this looks like Marvel threw up in here and hired an interior designer to clean it up. And nobody can explain how any of this got here.” Willow leaned closer. “Tell me that ain’t genie behavior.”

A hysterical laugh escaped me despite how deeply unsettled and overwhelmed I felt.

Willow grabbed my arm, her fingers digging in. “No, seriously. Who painted the walls? Who mounted that big-ass TV? And how the hell did somebody get all this shit upstairs without us hearing or seeing anything?!”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out!” I shouted in a panicked whisper.

Kaidence turned around from the floor, his big brown eyes wide with innocence. “Mommy, can I keep everything?”

I faced him, my heart breaking and racing all at once. “Baby, I don’t even know where any of it came from.”

“But it’s in my room,” he pouted.

Willow nodded earnestly beside me. “That’s a pretty solid legal argument.”

“Not helping, Willow.”

Kaidence held up the action figure again, looking at me pleadingly. “Can I play with my new toys?”